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coondoggie writes "It has been years in the making but NASA said its Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured a new view of the rim of the planet's Endeavour crater, perhaps the rover's ultimate destination. The Mars rover set out for Endeavour in September 2008 after spending two years exploring the Victoria crater. NASA says Endeavour is 13 miles across, some 25 times wider than Victoria crater, and could offer scientists more insight into the red planet's makeup."

you obviously come from a time *after* TV repairmen. once, it was considered a virtue to design things that lasted for ages. Its our modern wasteful profit mongering way to design things to fail.

Personally, I commend them for designing the thing as well as they did, because really, the cost of getting a new rover up there every year far outweighs the cost of continued support for this one. Add in the increased chances of losing a rover during launch or re-entry on mars, and it makes even more sense to get

Except the majority of the cost is fixed in the rockets to escape Earth and the spacecraft to reach mars, so a longer lasting robot is always better so long as it remains a minority of the cost of the exploration system.

Except the majority of the cost is fixed in the rockets to escape Earth and the spacecraft to reach mars, so a longer lasting robot is always better so long as it remains a minority of the cost of the exploration system.

This is incorrect. My understanding is that the two Mars Exploration Rovers cost roughly $850 million for the development, launch, and first 90 days of the mission. Of that, roughly $200 million was development cost, somewhere around $450 million was the cost of building (and other work like testing) the rovers, $75 million for operations, and $100 million for two rather cheap Delta II launches. So the launches took up roughly 12% of the total cost. This is typical fraction of cost IMHO for most satellites,

The GP is not making an argument for careful engineering, he's making an argument for risky cutting edge engineering.

He's not saying YOUR laptop should fail after the three day warranty, because that's not the requirements or what a consumer wants from a laptop.

He's saying a 90 day lifetime rover should die on day 100 having a 10 day safety margin and not a six year safety margin.

At the time, the spirit (so to speak) was for faster, better, cheaper. But we didn't get faster or cheaper from rover, we got better, just as usual.

The reward for dying on day 100 after a successful mission would have been to launch more rover and more rovers.

The punishment for lasting six years is that we've sent no more rovers up there. And the next rover is not the size of a toaster or trashcan, it's the size of an SUV and will be canceled.

Instead of grabbing the public's attention with a series of rovers, we've bored the public to death with the same version of Johnny 5 rolling around not doing much of anything as far as the public can tell for six years.

In all of my life, I am not sure I have ever read a more cynical post than you just wrote.

You sir, are the very definition of a crab in a barrel. Do you know what happens to crabs in a barrel when one of them tries to escape? The others pull him back down into the barrel.

Instead of celebrating the overwhelming success of the program, you denigrate it by saying it was too successful. Making something fail because of some artificial time horizon is just....well...stupid. My god man, don't you have ANY pride in success?

The GP is not making an argument for careful engineering, he's making an argument for risky cutting edge engineering.

He's not saying YOUR laptop should fail after the three day warranty, because that's not the requirements or what a consumer wants from a laptop.

He's saying a 90 day lifetime rover should die on day 100 having a 10 day safety margin and not a six year safety margin.

At the time, the spirit (so to speak) was for faster, better, cheaper. But we didn't get faster or cheaper from rover, we got better, just as usual.

The reward for dying on day 100 after a successful mission would have been to launch more rover and more rovers.

The punishment for lasting six years is that we've sent no more rovers up there. And the next rover is not the size of a toaster or trashcan, it's the size of an SUV and will be canceled.

Instead of grabbing the public's attention with a series of rovers, we've bored the public to death with the same version of Johnny 5 rolling around not doing much of anything as far as the public can tell for six years.

Grandparent is right, these things were way overbuilt.

Except that the two scenarios aren't mutually exclusive- we should have continued to send more robots over there while having the robots last longer than we ever expected.

Far better engineering would have had these things come in at 40% of the cost and had them die on day 97. Then we could have flown more and more of them.

Ah, what a fanciful imagination you have of how engineering works.

Where engineers can guarantee operation in a highly variable, largely unknown environment for X days, yet also nail tolerances so tightly they can predict parts will fail in 1.1X days. And save lots of money in the process, somehow. Even though relative to your own imaginary number the rovers we actually got cost 2.5x, yet lasted more than 25x.

The rovers were engineered as robustly as possible within the weight budget, simply to ensure that they would work at all on the surface of Mars, and therefore had the potential to last for a very long time. This is obviously a win if you think the goal was to have the maximum number of operational rovers on Mars at any given time. But the reason they haven't launched more has nothing to do with rover cost. It's because they don't have the budget to expand operations to cover more; NASA is already busy with this already vastly expanded mission.

The only reason a 90 day mission plan came up was because that was their very rough estimate of how long the solar panels could supply sufficient power before they became too covered in dust. They had always hoped they could continue the mission past that and had contingency plans for the operations budget to that effect, and were very pleasantly surprised that their assumptions were wrong. When the Martian wind turned out to be much stronger than expected, enough to blow dust off of the rovers' solar panels, that constraint on the rovers' life span was removed and their robust engineering could pay off.

Executive summary: The only serious mistake made in the planning, research and design of the rover mission was in predicting a short lifespan for the rovers, and that mistake turned out to be in the mission's and the taxpayer's favor.

While I don't agree with his supposition, He's not that far off the mark. In manufacturing, if the expected life is 1 year (with a warranty period of 90 days), and if a $10 part will last, literally forever while a $2 part will last for 1 year of continuous use... You choose the $2 part.

In manufacturing, if the expected life is 1 year (with a warranty period of 90 days), and if a $10 part will last, literally forever while a $2 part will last for 1 year of continuous use... You choose the $2 part.

Yes. But if the specs for your device includes high-g acceleration on launch, storage in vacuum at very low temperatures during transport, rapid heating during re-entry, another round of high-g deceleration, and finally operation in a thin atmosphere at still very low temperatures, you'll probably need the $10 part anyway. That it'll last virtually forever is just an added benefit.

Not only that, since we seem to crash 50% of everything we send to mars, you pretty much have to outlast your design requirements to get an average success rate.

The toughest part of the mission is just getting the thing on the ground in one piece. Some redundancy in engineering to hopefully make the rover last the failure of a few components will almost certainly ensure a long lifespan. Even so, don't forget we almost lost Spirit right in the beginning due to a software problem of all things. THAT would

This is exciting. The knowledge contained within this crater will feed millions and advance the knowledge nessesary for the survival of the Human Race by many years, and reveal the secrets of oil spill clean up as an added bonus!

Um, not exactly. Though the discoveries made there could free the minds of millions of people and entice some of the brightest people on the planet to focus their talents on space sciences. Surely that has some value, too.

I was tempted to respond in a similar way to the GP's trollish comment, but yours went too far in the other direction.

the discoveries made there could free the minds of millions of people and entice some of the brightest people on the planet to focus their talents on space sciences

Come on, Opportunity has been on Mars for 6 years now and at this point they are just playing with a VERY cool RC car in the (Martian) dirt. It is not that expensive to run at this point and it is certainly worth keeping unti

The remains of a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias in the bottom of Endeavor crater would certainly create some interest.

But the long drives by Opportunity have actually been pretty interesting. It has found several meteors. It has also been able to study an increasingly wide area of mars. A long baseline helps a lot in science and I suspect data from Opportunity will be used decades into the future.

Also if not life, then maybe evidence of life elsewhere. A squatter probe (like phoenix and the vikings) wou

In all fairness, when compared to the projects that government historically spends money on, blowing a couple hundred million bucks to drive a rc-car around on Mars doesn't seem like a bad investment.At least NASA and its contractors have come up with a few useful tech advances as a byproduct of throwing stuff into space.

This is exciting. The knowledge contained within this crater will feed millions and advance the knowledge nessesary for the survival of the Human Race by many years, and reveal the secrets of oil spill clean up as an added bonus!

I find your post very enlightening. Spirit and Opportunity should be supplied with Slashdot accounts and reprogrammed to post discouraging comments every few minutes. That would be far more helpful.

Actually, we would call those "eastern cultures". Only America, with its history of expansion and "go West, young man" thinks of life as growing the pie. The culture I've lived in for the past seven years does not have that idea at all - overcrowding within a confined space has a bad effect on a culture, making the zero-sum game the only way to live life. "If you win, then necessarily I must lose." This sort of thinking is pervasive and destructive. People will screw you over for no reason, none, other

I think you might be the delusional one. Since what you describe... is called... NATURAL SELECTION!It’s the principle that all life adheres to. In all of the whole of the universe.

Yes, in a confined space, if you win, I lose! Since “win” always implies gaining some resources (or more people with your mindset). So since the resources are fixed, this means they got taken from somewhere. Which is: YOU.

Even the simplest bacteria in a petri dish follow that basic rule.You live in a happy hippie

Weird, your "or this" sig link shows 10,909 sections, with the last being "Expansion of adoption credit and adoption assistance programs" as being part of chapter 49, "Cosmetic Services". I never thought of a living, breathing child as being "cosmetic" before.

It will cause deformations to the underlying rock strata, but that strata will still be visible and measurable. At the Haughton Impact crater in northern Canada, the cliffs that make up the crater rim maintain their structure. The material that was ejected has wound up as big breccia hills within the crater, and was also distributed around outside the crater.

Also, most of the hydrological (and dare I say hydrodynamical?) features actually come up after the impact, and can tell you a lot about the underlying mineralogy. As the heat from the impact dissipates, it heats water, which dissolves some minerals, which then bubble up to the surface. These hydro-thermal events that occur after the impact is also where you can best expect to find microbial life. In effect, you have all the needed ingredients for life present in a hydrothermal vent... warm, running water and associated minerals.

The impactor buries itself in the ground. then explodes. The explosion peals back the layers and stacks them upside down outside the crater like a shattered layer cake. They are easier to get to on the outside. That is why all the Apollo astronauts came to the crater to study geology.

I wonder what alternates to solar panels they've considered. Seems like a satellite could collect solar energy 24.6583 by 7 and beam it to the rover(s) using microwave or something. And the rover could carry less equipment, not have to worry about dust so much, and operate around the clock.

They've done this numerous times in the past. Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Recon Orbiter, etc etc. If its a good idea, or would even work (from a power perspective) is different, but putting the satellites in orbit is doable. Infact, I suspect it's easier than actually landing the rovers. Not having to do all the breaking and stuff. Hell, I would think (can't confirm it anywhere), whenever you send payload over to Mars, you're going to go into a Mars orbit first before deorbiting onto the surface. So a single

Not really, unless it has independently tracking antenna dishes for every drone/probe/rover/what have you. The more antennae you put on a satellite, the more independent control motors you have to use to operate them. This impacts the controllability of the satellite attitude in a very adverse manner. Every time you want to repoint a dish to track whatever it's particular target is, this induces a moment on the spacecraft. This moment has to be damped by the reaction wheels or CMG's on board and, all of th

Solar panels are the most efficient technology for that job we have today. Microwave transmission requires antennas of huge size - km according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and using lasers you'd have to use panels similar the ones being used.

Fine idea, except that it's a technology that has yet to be demonstrated in Earth orbit. Most of the research in this area is for Earth orbiting collectors to beam many megawatts of power. There are numerous technical difficulties that still need to be addressed. The size of the receiver, for one thing. For an orbiting solar power plant, the receiver would be many square kilometers in size. For the small power budget of a rover (100-500 W), the microwave receiver would be much larger than the rover its

Granted, I am not a sparky (Elect Engineer) so my knowledge might be lacking here....

How, exactly, can electricity/power be "beamed" from a satellite to the rover? As far as I know, we can't "beam" any significant amount of electricity because so much is lost in the medium. While I know it's possible to do some induction (like Wii remote chargers), I don't think that technology scales up very well.

Light? Microwave? Ok, either I am really a newb at eletricity or I am not catching what you are saying.

Let's take the light example. In other words, a laser. Can you build a laser big enough (as well as a receiver that is big enough) to transmit the energy required to run one of these rovers? I am asking a question about scale. I realize you can transfer some energy via laser. My question is: can you transfer enough to run a Rover? I don't think you can. I don't think we have advanced the tec

Let's take the light example. In other words, a laser. Can you build a laser big enough (as well as a receiver that is big enough) to transmit the energy required to run one of these rovers? I am asking a question about scale. I realize you can transfer some energy via laser. My question is: can you transfer enough to run a Rover? I don't think you can. I don't think we have advanced the technology even close to achieving that.

Yes, you can transfer enough. Getting that capability into Mars orbit is a different and currently very expensive problem. Just look at the power levels of lasers currently in operation. My understanding is that we already have continuous lasers in the 1 to 10 kW continuous range. They'll have to be green or blue, I think, to be usable by solar panels.

Same problem with microwave or any other non-wired technology. If this could be done from satellite to the mars surface, then why don't we all have "wireless power cords" by now?

Because the economics doesn't make sense. Do you want to pay say $1 to $100 per kilowatt-hour when you could plug into the wall for $0.10 per kilowatt-hour po

That seems like a very complicated and risky solution to a simpler problem. We have yet to proof of concept solar collectors and microwave energy transfer from orbit combination technologies here on Earth. Trying to do that for a semi-autonomous, moving rover on a distant planet would be....um...tricky and risky. If they don't like solar panels (which, admittedly, do have their limitations) I would think their first alternative power source of consideration would be an RTG [wikipedia.org]. That would give them a nice long

I wonder what alternates to solar panels they've considered. Seems like a satellite could collect solar energy 24.6583 by 7 and beam it to the rover(s) using microwave or something. And the rover could carry less equipment, not have to worry about dust so much, and operate around the clock.

I understand the current obstacle is converting that power to electricity again. For example, I was informed that if you use somewhere around 2-3 GHz frequency for your beam, then you're limited to somewhere around 200 W per square meter (which is roughly comparable with solar on Mars for efficient solar panels) due to the breakdown voltage of the Schottky diode, which is needed to rectify the microwaves to DC current and the effective area of a dipole antenna (more or less the smallest effective antenna yo

Uuum, you do know that there is already a huge satellite there, that beams power down all the time? It’s called the sun!And just as much as any “power beam”, it transmits the energy in form of electromagnetic waves.And guess what the dust would do to those satellite’s EM waves...

These rovers are great, and there's no denying the incredible engineering and workmanship that went into them. However, given the speed they are capable of traveling and the limited equipment they have on board, I can't help thinking that all the science they've accomplished over these many years could have been done in about 3 days by an actual human. A human can walk much faster than these rovers can travel, and a human is capable of interpreting data without having to wait 30 minutes each way for communications from the Earth.

The robots may be much cheaper, but a human on the surface of the planet would be much more efficient.

Funny how you should mention equipment, when a manned mission would have to carry huge, huge amounts of equipment to make sure said squishy little thing doesn't die on the way there from temperature, radiation, lack of air, water or food. Same goes for heat shields, parachutes and thrusters to not get killed during landing - landing like the rovers would leave them a bloody smear. Again all the environmental requirements applies on the planet, you'd need a huge solar panel just to keep the habitat at a survivable temperature. Most likely their operational reach is limited by getting home by nightfall when it's -80C (-110F) at best. Never mind that they probably want a way to return home that'll take even more room for a launch vehicle. In short, the whole expedition is huge long before you have the tiniest bit of scientific equipment.

Robotic exploration of the planets has been tried, and found to be incredibly slow. This is partially technology, and partially politics, but the experiment has been tried, and that's the result.

Here is an example - the Viking Mars orbiters were assumed to not need biological sterilization and were put in an orbit with a 50 year lifetime, because surely in 50 years we would know if there was life on Mars, right ? 50 years from Viking is 2025, which is now not that far off. (And, incidentally, the satellite

It has been years in the making but NASA said its Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured a new view of the rim of the planet's Endeavour crater, perhaps the rover's ultimate destination. The Mars rover set out for Endeavour in September 2008 after spending two years exploring the Victoria crater. NASA says Endeavour is 13 miles across, some 25 times wider than Victoria crater, and could offer scientists more insight into the red planet's make-up."

K'breel, speaker for the Council, emphasized that the site for the final battle was well-defended:

"Gentle citizens, it has been years since the twin mechanized monsters touched down on our sweet red soil, but the Council is pleased to report that the last remaining mobile invader from the blue planet has been sighted by sentries approaching the rim of End-Devaur crater. The invader set out for End-Devaur last summer after spending a year at Victory Hole; Planetary Land Defense Forces have pinpointed the invader's location to a point in the trackless wastes at least half a year's journey from End-Devaur."

"The enemy's slow progress across the wastelands leaves us with ample time to amass an overwhelming counterforce, and at last we shall see this campaign through to its end. Rejoice! Within half a revolution around our star, this monstrosity from the blue world shall find its ultimate destination!"

When a junior reporter mentioned the persistent rumor that the invader was merely a scientific probe operating at least order of magnitude past its design lifespan, K'Breel raised a spirited toast "to an opportunity for victory!", and devoured the ends of the reporter's gelsacs.

Since all planned objectives have been met, how about sending one rover to other rover and pull it out of its hole. Then, working as a team, explore MARS together in the true "spirit" of cooperation.What an "opportunity"!

For me this is an example of how equipment generally can last longer away from Earth. Our environment is corrosive and toxic. Water gets into enclosures. Metals oxidize. Science stations in open space last the longest. On Venus they last the shortest time. Mars is nearer to the long end of the spectrum for survival time.

If I was going to be programmed into a robot I might choose to live in the asteroid belt. Things decay slower there.

I do know what you are getting at and I don't want to see them die, but I don't think you quite grasp how *big* this crater is. It is 13 miles in diameter. Opportunity's total odometer is under 13 miles. It still has another 8 miles to go to reach the crater. Then, to even get *around* would require a doubling of its current lifetime. The crater is just *that* big.

No, sadly, this will be the ultimate destination, but it will be an AMAZING one!